Considering that the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S were selling like hotcakes last year, Apple was never going to struggle to meet the investors’ expectations this year. It turns out Apple did not need an iPhone 5 at all. The company reported that its profits doubled for the holiday quarter last year. Apple has sold 183m of these smartphones since the product started selling in 2007.

The iPhone is not the only product that is selling well for Apple. The iPad sales have doubled to a record 15.4m in the last quarter. Apple’s great quarter generated $46.3 billion in sales. That is 73% up from last year. Wall Street analysts’ $38.9 billion sales forecast was easily shattered by these results. Apple’s performance was so good it easily topped the results for Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo combined.

We’re thrilled with our outstanding results and record-breaking sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs … Apple’s momentum is incredibly strong, and we have some amazing new products in the pipeline,  Read the rest of this entry »

Google and Apple will be going back and forth over market supremacy in the mobile OS business in the next few years. Regardless of what one thinks of Android, there is no question the platform has grown so rapidly in the past few months. With Google acquiring Motorola Mobility, its competition with Apple is expected to only intensify. Unfortunately for Google, Android is not exactly killing iOS off. Take Verizon for instance. It has been selling Android phones for a couple of years already. But there are signs the network is losing Android marketshare since iPhone 4′s debut in it.

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It is not a surprise to see iOS growing its marketshare every quarter that passes by. Android aside, other mobile OS platforms do not have a huge momentum behind them. According to the latest study by comScore, Apple iOS platform is now a more popular platform than RIM’s Blackberry.

Credit: comScore

As expected, every quarter that goes by, more people start using smart-phones to do all kinds of things. Mobile content usage has been rising consistently. Most folks use their phones to send text messages to others. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past few years, Apple has managed to gain a lot of momentum in the stock market with its innovative products such as iPhone and iPad. No matter how large a company, when it loses $10b in marketcap in a matter of minutes, it raises eyebrows. Flash crashes have happened in the past. This time around, it is Apple that is a victim.

Credit: Andy Zaky via Fortune

We are no stock market experts, but apparently this type of crash is not normal, especially considering that Apple is not dealing with a new disaster (at least not one that we know of yet). There were rumors that Steve Jobs may have returned to hospital. But that rumor is not true and could not be behind this strange crash: Read the rest of this entry »

The iPhone 4 was highly anticipated among Verizon customers. The phone’s technology is a few months old but that has not stopped people from adopting it. Verizon and Apple had a ton of iPhones to start with but Verizon ran out of stock shortly after the first orders were placed. How many units did Verizon sell? According to JPMorgan analyst Phil Cusick, the company may have sold 500k on February 3rd. Verizon Wireless certainly sounded excited about its early results:

In just our first two hours, we had already sold more phones than any first day launch in our history. And, when you consider these initial orders were placed between the hours of 3 a.m. and 5 a.m., it is an incredible success story. It is gratifying to know that our customers responded so enthusiastically to this exclusive offer — designed to reward them for their loyalty.

So much for Droid being a tough competitor to iPhone. Droid is a powerful phone, but it never got the chance to go head to head with iPhone. From the initial results, it would have not been a close competition anyway. Apple and Verizon are expected to announce their initial results in the very near future but no official numbers are released yet.

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